Travel Filo

Last week when I was on a class trip with my 7th graders, my new Baroque Personal Black arrived from Italy. I think it's pretty and everything, but I had my doubts whether I'd find a job for it and whether we'd make good friends.
Today I finally gave it it's purpose: From now on it's going to be my travel filo! I already told you about the Travel Journal by Moleskine (look here), but I really wanted to a filo to keep all my documents save. So I punched holes into all the vouchers we need for our next trip (to Iceland! Yippie!), punched the e-tickets for our flights and the train journey to Frankfurt and back and even found that my passport fits nicely into the pocket on the inner left.
Here's a picture:

So, do you have any other ideas of what to include? Please let me know!

Mix-Monday 7

This week is going to be very busy with work, as lots of stuff had to be left on my desk last week when I spontaneously accompanied my 7th graders on a class trip because their class teacher was sick at home. 

But: Spring has sprung and my fiancé and I are leaving for Iceland on Sunday! Two weeks of vacation, spent with my favorite guy in the whole world, in my favorite country, visiting friends and enjoying the beautiful nature of that island in the North Atlantic... (does the anticipation show?).

That also means that I won't be able to blog very much (if at all), but I have a couple of posts planned. Also, in the meantime, check out our Filomaniac Forum. There's an English section as well!

Travel Journal by Moleskine

A while ago I came across the Travel Journal by Moleskine. I bought it and have used it to plan our trip to Iceland over Easter.
Here's a little something about it:

The journal has the usual "Personal Details" page, but with travel related info as well (e.g. vaccination, travel insurance, ...). This page is followed by 4 pages of Airline Loyalty Card information, so there's space for the information on 12 (!!) cards.
Followed by this are two pages that I personally find incredibly useful: Don't Forget - Standard Checklist. There's loads of space for the standard items you take on a journey (pre-printed: toothbrush :)), much more than you could ever wanna take, but again, I find it so useful.
Next there's a fold out page containing yearly overview calendars of 2011-2018 with a Travel Timeline on the back of the folding out part.
Then there are 14 pages of useful information, for example Time Zones, Temperatures and Days of Rain, Flight Durations, etc.

As a main part the Travel Journal has 5 tabbed categories: Wish List, Planning, Weekends, Short Trips, Long Trips.

The Wish List contains a couple of pages where you can write destination names and have some (limited) space for notes on each destination.
Next is the Planning tab. This contains pages where the left hand page contains space to answer the five Ws (where, when, who, what, why) and the right hand page gives you space for budget planning (what - price - total).
The Weekend tab has a "before" part on the left page (destination, date, how to get there, travel guide, travel companions, notes and checklist for this trip) and an "after" part on the right page (memorable moments and half a page for photos or clippings).
Next is the Short Trips tab, which is similar to the Weekend one, just on four instead of two pages. It gives you one whole page for your checklist, another one for memorable moments and one more for photos and clippings.
The Long Trip tab gives you a luxurious 8 pages per trip. There's the "before" part (see Weekend) on two pages, one page where you can just write the places you have been and the dates, one page for maps and notes, two pages for memorable moments and two for photos and clippings.

Behind all this there are five more tabs to label as you please. The first two give you 20 pages of lined paper, the next has eight divided pages (5 lines per page), then come two tabs giving you 15 pages for photos and drawings and 15 pages of blank paper.
At the very end of the journal you can find an index with pre-printed page numbers.

In the back of the book there are also two fold-out pockets and some stickers.

Now, as I said at the beginning I use this journal to plan our trip to Iceland. I really like the structure the journal gives me, but there are also some things that I won't be using (e.g. the photos/clippings pages, I've got my SmashBook for that). One thing that totally annoys me is the fact that the paper is not very good for fountain pen writing. Writing with my Lamy (medium nib, Lamy blue) leaves some bleed-through and the paper is so thin that you can read everything on the next page as well.

If you are still interested, though, have a look here.

Mix-Monday 6

So hopefully by this afternoon I will be three quarters on my way to getting the security of tenure. Is there anything else exciting going on in your lives?

DIY CD Sleeves for Filofax

Today I want to write about making my own CD sleeves for my Filofax. I know that CD sleeves are available from Filofax, but I think they are ridiculously expensive, especially when you can make them yourself for a fraction of the prize (and have fun while doing so)!

Quite a while back I found those CD sleeves for A4 folders in my local discounter.

There were 5 of those sleeves, holding 4 CDs each. First thing I needed to do was cut them in half.

Then I put some colorful adhesive tape on the sleeve, right where I wanted to punch the holes.

I folded it over and taped the backside as well. Almost done already! The only thing I still had to do was punch. I use a one hole punch, so I had to use an original Filofax insert as a stencil and punch through the tape and sleeve. I found that doing it like ripping of a band-aid (fast!!) was easiest. And now - TADAA:

My CD sleeves hold 2 CDs each plus either a list with tracks on the CD or whatever else you want to insert into the small pocket on each side (I chose to store little stickers in there, see above). I spent about 3€ on the sleeves and half an hour working on them. I now have 10 sleeves for my A5, holding 2 CDs each, which would have cost me nearly 100€ had I bought the original ones. Granted, mine probably won't survive decades, but still, I am very happy with them!

Filofax-Forum

Iris from Filomaniac just posted the link, so I'll just go ahead, too! Some of us readers over at Filomaniac thought it would be nice to have a forum to talk about all things Filofax, so we just made one. It took some work, especially on Izzies part, but now it's here:

filomaniac.plusboard.de

I really hope you enjoy it and that soon we'll all be posting away!

PS: There's an English section as well.

PPS: In case you were wondering, I go by Sverri on the boards, it's my nickname. 

Mix-Monday 5

So another week has gone by and I found a heck of a lot of new stationery stuff I just need to have. Like a personal planner (www.personal-planner.co.uk or www.persoenlicherkalender.de, thanks to Plannerisms) or Smashbooks, which I had never heard of before, but I think sound like a whole lotta fun. I also became a member of the Ink Drop at Goulet Pens and can't wait for my first inks to arrive.

And one of my best friends will be spending her Easter vacation in Japan with her boyfriend, so I am thinking about what to ask her to bring me. Any suggestions?

Oh, and I also ordered a BCC and a Metropol Compact Kingfisher Blue at www.filofax.co.uk. But don't tell my better half ;)

Mix-Monday 4

Here in Germany the weather has been quite mild during the last week or so, so I'm tempted to say that spring is in the air! Don't get me wrong, winter is still my favorite season, but spring means so many positive things to me this year that I just can't seem to wait!
So to get ready for spring I cleaned out my closet and donated 8 (!!) bags of clothes to charity last week. I should probably also clean out my office, too, but I won't be able to part with any of my pens, notebooks, etc. ;) I am planning on changing my Filofax setup, though, which I am sure I will blog about once I am satisfied with it.

Is there anything you are looking forward to this spring?

Lamy AL-Star Coffee (m)

First, let me say I'm sorry for not blogging during this last week. A pretty bad case of the flu made both me and my fiancé lay around and quietly suffer most of the week. So much for a great birthday. And it was the big 3-0, too! :(
Anyway, there was something very special about my b-day and that was my significant other finally acknowledging the fact that giving me a fountain pen is better than pretty much any other gift.

So here it is, my newest addition to the Lamy family: The Lamy AL-Star coffee with a medium nib.
He even got me a very nice box:

But let's start at the beginning:
I got my first Lamy when I started elementary school. It was a Lamy abc and I still own it. In Germany kids learn to write with a fountain pen at a very early age, which I personally think is great because it makes the handwriting look so much better. Which is also one of the reasons why I still love to use a fountain pen.
When I started secondary school, my parents bought a white Lamy Safari for me. I still own this one as well (isn't that great value? The Safari nowadays costs about 18€ and my oldest one is 20 years old and still does its job!).
The Safari really did it for me. Over the years I bought more colors, black, blue, red and vista from my pocket money. During the last couple of years two Lamy nexx, a new white one, an aquamarine one and a silverblue AL-star joined my collection.

Enter AL-Star coffee

I love this pen. What's great about all Lamys is that you only have to put in the cartridge and you can almost immediately start writing. The pen is comfortable to hold, even with the weird way I weave my fingers around pens. The ink flow is smooth and even and the AL-Star has that cool aluminum feeling to it. I personally enjoy the medium nib most, although I have some broad and some fine nibbed (is that even a word?!) Lamys and also some extra nibs to switch around, because every once in a while I might just enjoy the fine nib better for a short period of time. Changing the nib is quite easy on the Lamy, too, which is another reason to love it!

So, what's special about the AL-Star coffee? Well, all of the above PLUS the color. I think it's more of a chocolatey than a coffee brown, but since I like both coffee and chocolate that's fine by me. The brown looks very sophisticated (as sophisticated as a Lamy AL-Star can get, that is) and I like that it goes well with my Filofax Holborn Zip in Wine (the replacement, by the way, arrived back home on my birthday, too!). So now I have an AL-Star to go with my Ultra Violet Domino (the silverblue one) and one to be put into my Holborn.
There's just one tiny little thing I am sad about: it does not fit into the pen loop of the Holborn. But that really isn't the Lamy's fault ;).

PS: I see another AL-Star joining my collection in the near future: The ruby is coming to Germany this year. I had already looked into buying it online as it was only available in the States so far, but I couldn't yet get myself to spend 35$ or more plus shipping and handling (and customs) when the fountain pen costs 24€ in Germany!